the value of the labor is equal to the amount paid by the consumer who purchases the product/service. no more, no less. by introducing the capitalist as an intermediary between producer and consumer, you are artificially manipulating the real value of the labor. the consumer might pay 10 dollars for x, and worker might produce x in one hour for 10 dollars per hour, but by involving the capitalist in this exchange, the worker will get less for his work (which is less than the sales price), and the consumer will pay more for the product. the combined differences are the capital, the surplus value, which is essentially an artificial inflation (the price of sale) and deflation (the wage paid to the worker) at the same time.
now why would the consumer and the worker desire to make their exchange through this intermediate dead weight? why would the consumer want to pay more than the product is worth, and why would the worker want to make less than the product is worth?
these are non-problems, so capitalism isn’t ‘solving’ anything here, as you suppose. worker mobility/availability, coordination of productive and distributive forces, and job organization would all be under the administration of the workers themselves. no need for a capitalist to get involved and pretend like he’s necessary.
another non-problem. there would be no ‘on your own’ if there was no capitalist to ‘hire’ a worker. i’m not even sure what you mean here. workers will always be part of organized and interdependent groups regardless of what system they are operating in. unless you mean some guy who lives on a mountain, cures his own bear skins and then goes to town to sell them.
i’ll grant you the phrase ‘i earn more because i’m taking more risks’, even though the word ‘earn’ would be a misnomer. better to call it ‘appropriate’, which means, he’s allowed by law to own surplus value (money) his labor did not generate. also ‘working longer hours’ is a little questionable. the capitalist might stay in the office for more hours than the workers, sure, but his physical work output will always be much less than his employees per unit of time. well i should say ‘usually’. there are some petite bourgeois who do actually work some. but this doesn’t justify or make excuse for the capitalist.
and the capitalist’s ‘time and effort’ isn’t technically worth anything, for two reasons. he doesn’t actually produce anything, so there is no effort to be valued. second, consumers are valuing what the workers produce, and this production does not require the presence of the capitalist to happen. hence, while consumers might be happy that joe bob has a corner store where they can conveniently shop, what makes that shop valuable is the fact that workers fill it with goods.
after the capitalist figures his overhead and decides what profit margins he wishes to obtain, thereby setting the sales cost higher than they would be in the market if he didn’t exist.
lol - ‘charity’. the only charity running here is the charity the workers give to the capitalist by allowing him to control and keep what they produced.
correct. that characterizes the spirit and mechanics of system perfectly. well said.